It is odd that states can bar people from the ballot for age or place of birth without any enabling federal legislation.
@McPatrick in the arguments the point was made that there is a difference: something like age is generally uncontested while something like guilt for insurrection is contestable and judiciable.
Except in outlier cases, every state will agree on the age of a candidate. But different states might conclude differently on the question of guilt for insurrection.
That's the difference.
And note that they didn’t *touch* the underlying issue — which more than one court carefully considered and concluded that Trump DID commit insurrection.
That factual finding they ignored and opted to decide that instead the states couldn’t act in defense of the republic.
And that—that is bullshit.
@McPatrick No, that's a long-standing principle of how courts in the US work.
It's a long-standing principle that courts should not touch issues that they don't have to touch in order to resolve the question before them. They didn't have to look at the underlying question because they were able to answer the major question without going there.
There are other complications that would have come up had they looked at that underlying question, but suffice to say, it's just how the US courts work.
